Euthanasia and Organ Harvesting

When does allowing someone to die turn into encouraging someone to die? Always.

Last November, Colorado became the sixth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. It was and is a terrible idea.

Among the arguments my colleague John Stonestreet and others made was the fact that the so-called “safeguards” in these kinds of laws are illusions. Experience in Europe shows that once you concede the principle that some lives are not worth living, the definition of what kinds of lives are not worth living expands.

As one Belgian law professor put it, “What is presented at first as a right [to die] is going to become a kind of obligation.”